Tubby dreamed and wrote. Sometimes she wrote in her dreams—Shanhong would ask her for a sentence she had tried and failed to write during the day or, sometimes, for one she had not known she had wanted to write until he asked for it. When this happened, she would look at him and feel the light pouring forth from her imagined eyes. She had always loved how he had loved her with his mind—how he had used that restless intelligence to predict what she wanted or needed, what would make her life simpler or more perfect.

He had not always been right, or even often. His record in the dreamgame was much better. But his intellect had been the girders of his identity, and it was when he used that intellect for her that she felt the solidity of those girders, that she could look up in their midst and see a well-built ceiling more steadfast and beautiful than the fickle sky.

She did not think, dreaming, of how those beams had softened at the joins, how that ceiling had sagged before it fell. Those images were locked away, neighbors to her new terror for her own memory. But that terror was not silent behind its lock. How many more lessons could her mind bear, before it could no longer bend under the weight of new knowledge and began to break?

(Force equals mass times acceleration, Tubby thought once, in an attempt at self-comfort. The rocket scientists had been learning things almost no one could understand, at speeds no normal study could support. Tubby's course had acceleration, but not mass. Or so she prayed. At least she didn't have an NM port.)